The waste water from car washes, truck stops, machine shops, and other similar enterprises generate a multi-phase residue comprised of a lot of water admixed with a significant amount of oil, grease and sludge. Usually there will also be present detergents or surfactants that partially homogenize the mixture so that ordinary gravity separation does not remove all of the contaminants from the mixture. Therefore the mixture must not be released to find its way into the water table, or into flowing streams, because of the contamination of our natural resources.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have made available a system for economically handling this type waste material that efficiently separates the mixture into its various components, whereupon the treated water can be discharged or directly reused, the separated oil can be utilized as waste oil, and the resultant sludge can be accumulated and disposed of by approved means.
The system of this invention provides a novel coalescing multi-phase separator that includes a corrugated coalescer plate assembly and contains no moving parts and which provides a highly effective coalescing unit capable of performing the desired multi-phase separation. The apparatus of this invention preferably is used to separate a mixture of oil, water and solids that enter the coalescing multi-phase separator through a pump source and is distributed uniformly across a coalescing plate assembly.
The advantages of the present invention over existing prior art apparatus is the efficiency of operation, low cost of maintenance and disposal, and compactness of the unit. It easily can be mounted on a trailer for portability or installed as a stationary, permanent unit. Even though the unit is compact, the corrugations of the plate assembly maximizes the surface area for particle separation. The unit utilizes a static design having no moving parts, with a minimum rise and settling distance required for separated particles. The invention provides a vessel having an oil storage chamber and a sludge chamber contained therewithin. The invention further utilizes a non-plugging, corrugated coalescer plate assembly having no filament or the like to remove and clean or replace. The flow distribution is controlled by a unique distribution header that places an optimum static head on the coalescer plate assembly.
The coalescing multi-phase separator of the present invention is a very efficient device for separating multi-phase material of different specific gravity, such as, for example, a mixture of oil, water and solids. The effectiveness of the coalescing multi-phase separator can be enhanced by the judicial use of treatment chemicals, injected upstream of the feed line, for streams that contain non-free floating oil and non-free settling solids.